Lila was born with a silver panic button in her hand, so I have learned to divide everything she dreams up by seven. That’s not a bad rating on the Chick Kelly Reality Index. I know some guys — most of them producers and press agents — who are divisible by forty-eight before you get to the truth.
It’s about 6:00 p.m. and I am at the joint having a business breakfast with Barry Kantrowitz, my former agent and present partner. Barry was as successful an agent as I was a comic, so we were made for each other. Barry is divisible by three.
Of course, having breakfast with Barry is no great culinary experience. How any guy can eat shredded wheat with milk is beyond me. It’s like eating a wet mattress. I go for the Brisbane special — a rare strip sirloin, eggs over easy, hash browns, and plenty of mayonnaise.
I’m halfway through the first egg when Ling, my headwaiter, comes over and tells me that Lila is on the phone to inform me that my niece and nephew have been kidnaped.
I might as well have been talking to a farmer in Outer Mongolia for all the sense I got out of her. The children had been missing for five hours, and since they were the only witnesses to the D.A.’s killing, it had to be a snatch. And if I ever loved her, I would start negotiations with the underworld for their safe return.
This is some breakfast conversation! I told her to put Arthur, her husband, on, but she said he was at police headquarters. I told her I would be over pronto, hung up, and started dividing by seven.
My nephew and niece are 14 and 9 respectively. Flip is a big kid. To spirit him away would require all seven of the Santini Brothers and a large van. His sister, McCawber, is a human eel, and it would take fancy footwork just to shake her hand.
At this point, folks, you’re probably asking yourself what’s with the names? I can take credit only for Flip. McCawber was her father’s idea. Arthur McQuade (pronounce that AH-thur, as in AHdvertising agency) is more in love with his ancestors than the Dalai Lama. The girl is named after James Petny McCawber, who invented the inkwell or something. Flip’s real name is Foster Chapin McQuade, and God help him. Arthur did not take it kindly when I suggested that a kid named Foster sounded like he was being raised by someone else for pay. How could I introduce him? Meet my Foster nephew? So I call him Flip. Mostly because he’s all mouth (“like someone else I know,” my mother would add).
Normally I would write the whole thing off as two kids being late for dinner, but the D.A. killing got to me. It’s time to get on the think, which I do.
I tell Ling to get me a copy of the Post, which, when you think of it, is like asking Walter Cronkite to tune in NBC for the latest news report. Ling reads more newspapers than a presidential adviser.
“What do you want to know, boss?” he says with a hurt look on his face. I had really wounded the guy.
“What’s with the D.A. being murdered?”
“Not the D.A. An assistant. He was the prosecutor in the Siepi case. They found his body behind a soda-pop machine in the East 14th Street IRT subway station this afternoon.”
Ling goes on to give me the picture, spitting out data like a teletype. Miles Corbett was an ambitious Assistant District Attorney, and the Siepi case was his first big shot at the headlines. I was already familiar with the Siepi hassle. They had nailed old Gino with a Murder One for knocking off Sally Bond. In my book it was a draw.
Gino Siepi was a hood and Sally was an ex-tramp who made her bread by blackmail. Good old Gino the Sappy was the last person seen leaving Sally’s apartment on the night she got it. The boys in blue played tag and Gino lost.
So where does this leave me? Did the kids see Corbett get it? This Ling cannot answer, so it’s back to Ma Bell for me.
Believe it or not, there are a few cops who like me. Not love me, mind you, but like me. One of them is Steve Kozak. Steve is a sergeant on the Vice Squad and we have mutual friends.
Steve tells me that he doesn’t know too much about the case except that the cops didn’t want to take Siepi to trial. The evidence was full of holes, but Corbett, being top man while the D.A. was out of town, insisted. For three days he’s getting his pants beaten off in court, and it looks like Siepi will soon be walking the streets again. Then on Wednesday, Corbett makes a grandstand play for the TV cameras and announces he will bring in vital evidence the next day.
“We told him it was a dumb thing to do,” Steve tells me, “but a guy who wants to be Governor someday has to create cliffhangers for the public. As for the snatch, I’m empty. Sorry about the kids. Give me ten minutes and I’ll dig around.”
Now I’m getting scared. It’s the gut response when trouble decides to sit on your porch instead of someone else’s.
The phone ringing was as startling as a clang out of hell. It was Kozak with a spadeful.
Corbett had left his apartment on East 86th Street yesterday morning at 8:45. According to his wife, he was carrying an envelope in his brief case which he had picked up at Kennedy Airport the night before around midnight.
At this point the police theory was that Sally Bond, being the bright girl she was, had salted away her blackmail dope with someone out of town. It was the old “If something happens to me, open this envelope and spill the beans.” That someone got in touch with Corbett and flew in with the goods.
“So how do the kids figure in?” I asked him.
“Your niece and nephew were on the same subway as Corbett. The little girl recognized him on television when they announced his murder. She said he had been sitting across from her all the way from 77th Street, and just before the train pulled into the 14th Street station he bolted into the next car. She remembered that he had been carrying an unusual-looking brief ease — Corbett’s was made of ostrich skin. Lieutenant Jaffee thinks that Corbett saw his killer and was trying to get away. He also thinks your niece may have seen the killer, too.”
“Jaffee! Is Jaffee on the case?”
“Yeah, Chick, so I’d stay clean if I were you.”
Early on I said a few cops like me. Jaffee hates me. He has never forgiven me for getting out of a murder rap when a lady was found dead in my apartment.
“Does he know the kids are relatives of mine?”
“I don’t know, but what’s the difference? He’ll do a good job anyway.”
That I had to give him. I have seen Jaffee in action and he’s good. Believe me, I respect my enemies.
“The thing that gets me, Steve, is how you guys got a line on the kids.”
“Their father called in Thursday night after the little girl recognized Corbett’s picture on a TV newcast about his murder.”
Good old AH-thur, the civic-minded goon. If he had kept his mouth shut, the kids would now be safe. I made a mental memo to break AH-thur’s neck when all this was over.
“Didn’t Jaffee put a guard on the kids? He drops them into this mess, makes them a target, then doesn’t guard them?”
“That’s what’s odd about this, Chick. He had three men outside their apartment building, one in the rear and two in the lobby. All good eye men. They never saw the kids leave. Jaffee’s had the building searched twice.”
“Why didn’t he put someone right outside the door?”
“Mrs. McQuade wouldn’t allow it.”
Oh, yes, the old Kelly family bugaboo — what will the neighbors think?
“So what’s happening, Steve? Was it one of Siepi’s morons?”
“That’s the party line at the moment, but they’ve all gone beddy-bye. But you can’t discount anyone who was in the Bond dame’s little black book. We estimate that crowd to be about a hundred, so take your pick.”
Sweet sufferin’ Saint Sebastian! My palms are beginning to sweat. I have loved very few things in my life, even an ex-wife or two, but those two kids really ring the gong with me. Right now I want to get a machine gun and knock off every hood in town until I find them. But that’s Nutsville.